-tania


The suffix -tania or -etania denotes a territory or region in the Iberian Peninsula. Its historical origin is in the pre-Roman Iberia. Its etymological origin is discussed by linguists. Spanish Jesuit philologist Hervás y Panduro proposed their link to the Celtic languages, in which the root *tan or *taín means department or region. "In Irish, tan expresses the idea of country, territory."
Other philologists such as Pablo Pedro Astarloa suggest a combination of the Basque root *eta with the Latin root *nia used in place names.
The form of demonym used by some epigraphs in the Iberian language found in coins is -ken or -sken, as in Ikalesken, which is unrelated to the Latin-Hispanic -tanus. This suggests that -tania may be a denomination of Roman origin. According to the historian and archaeologist Manuel Gómez-Moreno, the Latin suffix -tani corresponds to the Iberian -scen, For example, the Ausetanians who called themselves Ausesken. The Romans also applied this suffix to other peoples of the western Mediterranean, and to a lesser extent to those of the Italian Peninsula, where however the suffix -ates prevails. Before Roman contact with the Iberian peoples, there were already Greek colonies in Iberia. The ancient Greeks used the older suffix -ητες, -εται or -ηται, which would be replaced by -ητανοι or -ετανοι, according to researcher Ulrich Schmoll.
Another theory, partially developed by the Aragonese jurist Joaquín Costa, relates that suffix to the Berber *ait, which means both "son of" and "the tribe", or with *at, meaning "people." This theory that supports that "aide" is a relative in Basque.

Examples